{"title":"Peepal Tree Press","description":"\u003chr\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003ePeepal Tree Press is the home of the best in Caribbean and Black British fiction, poetry, literary criticism, memoirs and historical studies. Based in Leeds, Peepal Tree is a wholly independent company, founded in 1985, and now publishing around 30-40 books a year. The list features both new writers and established voices. In 2009 Peepal Tree launched the Caribbean Modern Classics Series, which restores to print essential classic books from the 1950s and 60s. Peepal Tree's focus is on what George Lamming calls the Caribbean nation, wherever it is in the world, though they are also concerned with Black British writing.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003ePeepal Tree began on a sugar estate in the East Coast Demerara in Guyana in 1984 when founder Jeremy Poynting vowed to print the works of writers in Guyana back in England, as government restrictions were holding them back from doing so. Its name takes its inspiration from the peepal trees, found in the Caribbean and is used as a metaphor for something that is transplanted and putting down roots in a new environment. \u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eSupported by Arts Council England as a National Portfolio Organisation since 2011 has enabled them to sustain Inscribe, a writer development project that supports writers of African \u0026amp; Asian descent in England.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eTo discover more of Peepal Tree Press' history, follow the link to their website below. \u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003ctable style=\"width: 472px; height: 100px;\" border=\"0\" align=\"center\"\u003e\r\n\u003ctbody\u003e\r\n\u003ctr\u003e\r\n\u003ctd style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePeepal Tree Press\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e17 King's Avenue\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLeeds\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLS6 1QS\u003c\/strong\u003e\n\u003c\/td\u003e\r\n\u003ctd\u003e \u003c\/td\u003e\r\n\u003ctd\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eTel: +44 (0)113 245 1703\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ehttp:\/\/www.peepaltreepress.com\u003c\/strong\u003e\n\u003c\/td\u003e\r\n\u003c\/tr\u003e\r\n\u003c\/tbody\u003e\r\n\u003c\/table\u003e\r\n\u003chr\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"angel","title":"Angel","description":"First published to great acclaim in 1987, \u003ci\u003eAngel\u003c\/i\u003e begins in 1951, when the workers of Grenada revolted against the white estate owners, moving forward to 1983 when the US invaded to put an end to a radical experiment that had turned violently in on itself. At the story’s heart are the headstrong Angel and her mother, Doodsie. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat makes \u003ci\u003eAngel\u003c\/i\u003e such a rewarding novel to return to, especially in this revised new edition, is the seamless movement between the warmth and tensions of family life and the seriousness of irruptive, life-changing political conflict.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[There is] a richness, a thickness, a stinging slangy that-there thingyness of observation and detail…\" \u003cbr\u003eRobert Nye, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMerle Collins\u003c\/b\u003e was born in 1950 in Aruba. She was deeply involved in the Grenadian revolution and served as a research coordinator for the Government of Grenada. Her second novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Colour of Forgetting\u003c\/i\u003e, was published in 1995, and her short-story collection \u003ci\u003eThe Ladies are Upstairs\u003c\/i\u003e by Peepal Tree in 2011. Her third and most recent poetry collection is \u003ci\u003eLady in a Boat\u003c\/i\u003e (Peepal Tree, 2003). She teaches Caribbean Literature at the University of Maryland. \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041084368,"sku":"9781845231859","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_111451cc-a47e-41a9-a37a-78c3ddf3fffe.jpeg?v=1752238090"},{"product_id":"allah-in-the-islands","title":"Allah in the Islands","description":"The novel returns to the aftermath of the trial of Beatrice Salandy and the villagers of Rosehill on the island of Santabella first met in Flanagan’s novel \u003ci\u003eYou Alone Are Dancing\u003c\/i\u003e. Though Beatrice is acquitted to the joy of the village, it is clear that nothing has changed. Though Santabella has been independent for several decades, only the new Black ruling class has benefited. Most Santabellans struggle to scratch a living, find adequate schools, healthcare or even reliable basic services. Cynical corruption flourishes and the queues to get visas to escape to America grow ever longer and more desperate. For Beatrice there is the recognition that Sonny, the man she loved, has wholly abandoned her, settled in the USA with a white American wife.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut there is one new element: a rapidly growing radical Muslim movement with a growing appeal to the poor Black people of Santabella with their welfare schemes, grass-roots campaigning and air of incorruptibility. And there is the Haji, the charismatic leader of movement who combines a media-savvy native wit, a well-developed mystique and a steely control over his group. Even Beatrice is impressed. Between the Mosque, regularly raided for arms by the police and army and Rosehill is Abdul, whose aunt lives in the village and who is the Haji’s second in command. It is Abdul, decent serious Abdul, who is one of the main narrative voices in the novel. But does his sincerity go with honesty about the violent coup that the Haji plans? Abdul’s becomes a fascinatingly unreliable voice, part revealer, part concealer of the truth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTrinidad born \u003cb\u003eBrenda Flanagan\u003c\/b\u003e teaches creative writing, Caribbean and African American Literatures at Davidson College, North Carolina. She is also a United States cultural ambassador, and has served in Kazakstan, Chad and Panama.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":1041084728,"sku":"9781845231064","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_4bb50a9b-6d00-4c8a-b9a1-116702c5dfcb.jpeg?v=1752237361"},{"product_id":"the-scent-of-the-past-and-other-stories","title":"The Scent of the Past and other stories","description":"If one wanted to find out what Trinidad and the Caribbean have been like in the last decades of the 20th century, there would be no better place to look than the stories in this collection. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhilst many of the writers of his generation reconstructed the Caribbean world from distance and memory, publishing primarily for a metropolitan audience, Brown’s stories began as publications in his weekly newspaper column with a very substantial popular audience. But there is nothing ephemeral about this work, because Brown invested these pieces with all a major poet’s delight in the power of language and with a craftsman’s meticulous concern for their structure as short stories. Frequently, the line between fiction and actuality is deliberately blurred as Brown invokes the shaping light of memory to resurrect the people and places he had known or loved (or merely imagined). Wayne Brown is no less a character in these fictions than Philip Roth and his various avatars are in his novels. What the reader encounters in the collection is Brown’s striking ability to portray people and tell stories that are particular and unique, but which cohere to form an unrivalled portrait of a rapidly changing society.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBest known as one of the Caribbean’s most incisive commentators, \u003cb\u003eWayne Brown\u003c\/b\u003e raised a weekly newspaper column to a literary art. Between 1984 and 2009, some 3,500 editions of his column “In Our Time” appeared in Trinidadian and Jamaican newspapers.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041084888,"sku":"9781845231538","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_b2a071fa-73b5-4495-bd87-c1898b20918b.jpeg?v=1752238151"},{"product_id":"considering-woman-i-ii","title":"Considering Woman I \u0026 II","description":"In 1989, Velma Pollard’s \u003ci\u003eConsidering Woman\u003c\/i\u003e, a collection of short stories, fables and memoir, announced an important publishing debut. Now, over twenty years later, a second collection, \u003ci\u003eConsidering Woman II\u003c\/i\u003e, various and rich in its own right, is brought into dialogue with the republishing of the earlier pieces in a single volume. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDialogue between its components is, indeed, intrinsic to the organisation of \u003ci\u003eConsidering Woman II\u003c\/i\u003e. Whilst the stories in 'Bitter Tales' are very explicitly set in the past, they are often accompanied by a present-day women’s talk commenting on the story. In 'Mrs Uptown' for instance, we learn that what begins as a story of male abandonment, but becomes an account of a woman who finds a good man and happiness, is being told by the now elderly woman to her neighbour at a conference called 'Young Women in Crisis'. It is clear that the world presented in these pungently written stories of rape, abuse and unsupported pregnancies is not safely in the past. And the balancing sequence of 'Better Tales', each of which arrives at some place of epiphany, safety and even contentment, does so in a world where babies are abandoned in pit latrines, where poverty forces families to give away their children, and a young woman has five unsupported children by the age of twenty-five. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf the later stories no longer feel the need to reflect on the process and reception of women’s writing (which the earlier collection does very wittily), across all the work is an acutely sensitive consciousness of the consequences of the passage of time. 'Gran…', the longest piece in the book, is both a deeply moving account of the consequences of growing old, and a record of a vanishing way of life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVelma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085016,"sku":"9781845231699","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_cb865f93-073f-49f7-8e67-6fed92e6265e.jpeg?v=1752237361"},{"product_id":"vincent-roth-a-life-in-guyana-volume-2-the-later-years-1924-1935","title":"Vincent Roth, A Life in Guyana, Volume 2: The Later Years 1924-1935","description":"The second part of Vincent Roth's memoirs of a life in Guyana covers the years between 1923 and 1935 when a second bout of blackwater fever nearly killed him and forced his retirement from working in the interior.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn addition to his job as a government surveyor (one task was to survey a mere 400,000 acres between the Demerara and Berbice rivers) Roth was appointed as Warden of the Mazaruni, a post which combined being magistrate, inspector of weights and measures and regulator of the diamond and gold mining in the area - tasks which brought him into a world far from the proprieties of colonial Georgetown. There are vivid accounts of the Saturday night festivities when hundreds of prospectors and the 'women of the fields', gaudy birds of paradise, gathered at the trading posts for music, drinking, gambling and much more.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat comes over is a picture (a mixed and contradictory one) of Guyana as, on the whole, an enterprising and pioneering society. Much of Roth’s work was concerned with surveying the lots of farmers and gold and diamond prospectors - people creating if not great wealth, at least making things happen. But he also has a sharp eye for grandiose follies; interior enterprises built on dreams of wealth but inadequate foundations of knowledge. Their memorials lie in the ruins of mines collapsing into bush. And though Roth has an acerbic view of jumped-up officialdom and bureaucratic incompetence, he neverthess gives a picture of a country that worked, where the mail and the daily papers reached the remotest parts of the interior, but where the obliterating power of nature over human effort had to be constantly resisted. His accounts of roadbuilding and ideas for agricultural schemes suggest possibilities not yet realised in the Guyana of the present.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this volume, Roth grows from energetic and opinionated young manhood to a more relaxed and unbuttoned maturity. There is an affectionate portrayal of his relations with his father (and samples of Roth senior's appalling jokes!) and with his two sons who join him on his later expeditions. An epilogue, written by his son-in-law, Michael Bennett, takes Roth's story beyond the days of his journal to note the contribution he made to Guyana in his journalism, his historical writing and his work with the museum and the zoological gardens.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBetween 1907 and 1964, Vincent Roth contributed immensely to the development of Guyana, first as a surveyor in the interior, then as a journalist, historian and naturalist.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085056,"sku":"9781900715553","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_59ae4670-ed97-4764-a875-72b287304f88.jpeg?v=1752238090"},{"product_id":"the-ladies-are-upstairs","title":"The Ladies are Upstairs","description":"From the 1930s to the new century, Doux Thibaut, one of Merle Collins’ most memorable characters, negotiates a hard life on the Caribbean island of Paz. As a child there is the shame of poverty and illegitimacy, and there are the hazards of sectarianism in an island divided between Catholic and Protestant, the rigidity of a class and racial system where, if you are black, your white employer is always right—and only the ladies live upstairs. Doux confronts all such challenges with style and hidden steel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe leave Doux as an old lady moving between the homes of her children in Boston and New York, wondering whether they and her grandchildren really appreciate what her engagement with life has taught her. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn these tender and moving stories, Merle Collins demands that we do not forget such lives. If ghosts appear in several of the later stories, they are surely there to warn that amnesia about the past can leave disturbed and restless spirits behind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn addition to the Doux stories, this collection restores to print an earlier ‘Paz’ story, \u003ci\u003eRain Darling\u003c\/i\u003e, and their juxtaposition contrasts two very different responses to the hazards of life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMerle Collins is Grenadian. She is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories and two previous collections of poetry. She teaches Caribbean literature at the University of Maryland.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085104,"sku":"9781845231798","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_de599645-bc5a-450c-b974-f1f8acd48d2b.jpeg?v=1752237360"},{"product_id":"song-of-our-swampland","title":"Song of our Swampland","description":"When the killing starts in Dhaka, the villagers know the army from West Pakistan will soon be in their area, but unlike the other young men, and his beloved step-sister Moni Banu, Kamal cannot join the resistance. Born with a hole for a mouth, most people, except Abbas Miah, the teacher who adopts him, his friends and Moni Banu, regard him as the village idiot. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith Abbas Miah, Kamal embarks on a Noah’s ark journey, with the motley survivors of the massacre that inevitably comes, to find refuge in the distant floodplains until the war is over. Along with a bombastic old actor, the village mullah, the village cut-throat, two Hindu boatmen, a foul-mouthed old woman, and a pious Islamist, who might just be a collaborator, Kamal discovers that there can be no escape from the war and the issues it raises.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs our guide to the painful emergence of the new nation of Bangladesh, Kamal is forced both to observe the face of evil, the complexity of betrayal, and look within to discover whether he has the capacity for true community, whether he can follow the injunction: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'If someone knocks on your door, you don’t ask who it is. You don’t even look at their face. You just do everything you can for them.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSyed Manzurul (Manzu) Islam was born in 1953 in a small northeastern town in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). He has a doctorate and was Reader in English at the University of Gloucestershire, specialising in postcolonial literature and creative writing","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085128,"sku":"9781845231705","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_6d55d271-f317-4b2b-b114-23759ae18a62.jpeg?v=1752238089"},{"product_id":"the-crying-of-rainbirds","title":"The Crying of Rainbirds","description":"Torn between despair over 'the rancid taste of life on the island' and attachment to the 'irresistible, green island days', the characters in these short stories inhabit a Caribbean they find it impossible to live in, yet impossible to live without. They dream of being inviolable and whole, but live in situations which are frequently on the edge of disorder and personal threat. Yet there is nothing wearily pessimistic about the tone of this collection. Williams's stories, like his characters, are intensely alive. Their individual voices button-hole us and won't let us go. Their tales are sad, but what passion they have in their pursuit of meaning!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In Williams' brilliant final story... the urge to find release and return is given mystical and memorable expression...\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLiberation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eN.D. Williams\u003c\/b\u003e is Guyanese and lives in New York. In 1976 his novel \u003ci\u003eIkael Torass\u003c\/i\u003e won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085196,"sku":"9780948833403","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_4e8543db-5f51-4ca3-b20a-0e407d81df38.jpeg?v=1752237360"},{"product_id":"the-makings-of-you","title":"The Makings of You","description":"Nii Ayikwei Parkes’ début collection encompasses the story of a triangular trade in reverse – a family history that goes from the Caribbean back to Sierra Leone, and in his own life from London to Ghana, and back again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis gift as a poet is for the most rewarding kind of story-telling, including those stories told with wit and an engaging ambivalence about himself. His narratives move unerringly to a perfect punch-line, but in the collection as a whole there is a refreshing lack of complacency in his willingness to move out of his comfort zone and explore areas of imaginative fantasy, as in his \u003ci\u003eBallast\u003c\/i\u003e series, a tour de force of defamiliarisation, where he imagines how the slave trade would have gone had its mode of transport been the hot air balloon, rather than the slave ship. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is much humour, but it comes from a family tradition of knowing that 'our jokes weren’t really funny, they were just sad\/ stories we learned to laugh at'. Like all poets with a largeness of heart, with no embarrassment about embracing the deepest feelings, Parkes has an especial sensitivity to the promise and acute sensitivities of childhood, both his own and others.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"An astonishing, powerful remix of history and language and the possibilities of both\" Ali Smith, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNii Ayikwei Parkes is the author of three poetry pamphlets. In 2007 he was awarded Ghana's National ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085268,"sku":"9781845231590","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_f0499f5f-afda-48cc-ace4-95a214e7e5d8.jpeg?v=1752237359"},{"product_id":"american-fall","title":"American Fall","description":"Raymond Ramcharitar’s sophisticated and formally ambitious poems have Trinidad as their centre but are global in scope. This is reflected both in their subject matter and their form. The regular movement between the Caribbean, Europe and North America that several of the poems chart is seen both as a contemporary reality, and as no more than a continuation of history’s patterns: of, for instance, Indo-Trinidadians who are the ‘scions of waylaid Brahmins and pariahs’. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis particular migration is placed in the context of a wider world of human movement and ‘new theologies springing from old longings’. In form, too, the poems refuse to be confined by any limiting sense of the contemporary and the Caribbean. Use of the archetypes of classical mythology, traditional verse patterns (such as the villanelle) and the careful, confident use of rhythm and rhyme are the most evident outward features of Ramcharitar’s concern with form. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere are homages to Derek Walcott and Wallace Stevens, but the closer one’s acquaintance with the poems, the more evident that Ramcharitar’s post-modern voice is a thoroughly individual one, with a capacity for writing verse narratives that are condensed but reverberate like the best short stories, dramatic monologues that skilfully create other voices, and lyric poems that get inside the less obvious byways of emotion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRaymond Ramcharitar\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Trinidad. He worked as a journalist and is the author of a controversial and provocative study of the deficiencies of the Trinidadian press, \u003ci\u003eBreaking the News: Media \u0026amp; Culture in Trinidad\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085284,"sku":"9781845230432","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_f0b9ef43-354a-47d3-8548-da23ded128ef.jpeg?v=1752237028"},{"product_id":"hour-of-the-mango-black-moon","title":"Hour of the Mango Black Moon","description":"'We began by speaking in our own voices and tongues \/ then other voices \/ might take possession of our throats, our \/ Souls, for however brief or prolonged a moment'. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese lines describing the inner world of Stanley Greaves' painting 'Morning Mangoes' also describe the intensity and inwardness of Laurence Lieberman's meeting with the paintings of Greaves and two others of the Caribbean's visionary masters, Ras Akyem and Ras Ishi. In their language and reference, these poems are utterly contemporary, but gain resonance from being part of a poetic tradition of 'pictorialism' that perhaps reached its height in the 19th century with Browning and Ruskin's poetic prose.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is no accident that Lieberman focuses on the work of these three painters, for he clearly finds in them qualities that express his own psyche. In each there is a subversive, speculative, heterogeneous view of the world that challenges 'the lull of the everyday', the homogenising imperialism of western rationalism, consumerism and the market. Each of the painters has his own rich cosmology in which Lieberman finds part of himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo label these poems as 'descriptions' of the thirty or so paintings focused on in this collection gives no hint of their multiple rewards. They begin, indeed, in the kind of description found only in the very best art criticism: infectiously enthusiastic, exact, clear in the distinction between observation and speculation. They create rewarding and very human connections between the paintings and their makers. We meet them as vivid characters - Greaves with his oblique charm, Akyem's combative, restless energy, Ishi's elusive, enigmatic intensity - and Lieberman finds acutely appropriate and different dramatic styles to represent each painter and their work. But these poems are not merely commentaries on paintings but meditations that begin in the encounter with the art work and grow from that point. Above all, these are poems that work as poems in finding the language and architecture to capture the moment of engagement with the paintings in all its mixture of exactness and provisionality.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe collection is illustrated with sixteen colour plates of paintings described in the book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"His is a poetry of such awe, a nearly orthodox Romantic ecstasy, that is verges on the plangent... Leiberman's poems look and act like Marianne Moore's syntactical precessions mated with Roethke's nervous green world of passion. He has the grace to make his voyage into the eye of the world and back a communion for the reader.\"\u003cbr\u003eDave Smith, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Poetry Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"There's a remarkable sensibility guiding these poems, an inquisitiveness, a strong sense of humor and compassion. Lieberman's really is a singular achievement. His subjects, his style and syntax, his syllabic lines and cascading stanza - all are impossible to imitate or mistake for anyone else's... At sixty, he has become one of our truly indispensable poets.\"\u003cbr\u003eThomas Swiss, \u003ci\u003eThe Southern Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In purpose and effect, Lieberman's writing is without boundary. Indeed, it's hard to name a more distinctive and original American poet working today.\"\u003cbr\u003eG.E. Murray, \u003ci\u003eChicago Sun-Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Laurence Lieberman is perhaps the finest American poet writing in patterned free verse form. The style is sensuously narrative and descriptive. It exudes joy and vitality... a true American original.\"\u003cbr\u003eCharles Guenther\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLaurence Lieberman\u003c\/b\u003e is an American poet with deep Caribbean affiliations. He has published twelve collections of poetry and three volumes of literary essays.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085308,"sku":"9781900715935","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_59160467-1e4e-44e1-ab4b-842b0e6f5f64.jpeg?v=1752238089"},{"product_id":"back-of-mount-peace","title":"Back of Mount Peace","description":"A retired fisherman, Monty Cupidon, encounters a naked, bloodied and traumatised woman standing at the cross-roads. He offers comfort and takes her in. Suffering from amnesia, she cannot tell him anything about herself. \u003cbr\u003eThe only clues are the signs that she has once worn a wedding ring, has a butterfly tattoo and red nail polish on her toes. In the absence of memory, he names her Esther. So begins a remarkable sequence of poems that explores many dimensions of liminality. \u003ci\u003eBack of Mount Peace\u003c\/i\u003e occupies a space between lyric and narrative, between reflection and story. It explores the space between body and mind, making Esther’s halting discovery of her self through her body, which like a tree bears its indelible history and, unlike the mind, ‘doesn’t forget its grievances’, work both as moving narrative device and a deeply sensed and sensual reminder of the physicality of existence. \u003cbr\u003eAbove all, this is a sequence that explores a relationship which begins in a primal Edenic space of innocent discovery in which, as Monty hopes, ‘the hallelujah’s of new love will begin’, but which, like all relationships must enter history, the decay of time and the corruptions of knowledge. \u003cbr\u003eIn the use of rhyme and other patterns of sound, \u003ci\u003eBack of Mount Peace\u003c\/i\u003e shows an exceptional delicacy of formal control that constantly reinforces the poem’s insights and moving conclusions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085372,"sku":"9781845231248","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_01ed29a8-1568-44ca-b0d4-fdf74ecbdb96.jpeg?v=1752237359"},{"product_id":"snowscape-with-signature","title":"Snowscape with Signature","description":"Sadly now a posthumous collection, \u003ci\u003eSnowscape with Signature\u003c\/i\u003e shows Hopkinson to have been not only a pre-eminent recorder of 20th century Caribbean upheaval, of social indifference, wasteful violence and conflicts of race and politics, but a deeply moving poet of the inner person who can 'speak praise to heaven for this man's handicaps \/ which have stripped him at last down to himself'. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs a convert to Islam, Hopkinson also wrote some of the finest religious poetry to come from the Caribbean. In his adeptness with the 'sweet fetters' of form on a surprising fluidity of perception, Hopkinson will surely come to be seen as not only one of the Caribbean's finest poets, but an outstanding poet in any company.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe collection is introduced by the leading Caribbean poet and critic, Mervyn Morris.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Hopkinson's poems are tightly disciplined but his imagination ranges at will, his capacity to surprise makes every one of his poems worth reading.\" \u003cbr\u003eMario Relich, \u003ci\u003eLines Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbdhur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Guyana in 1934. He lived in Barbados and Jamaica until, suffering from kidney failure, he went to Canada in 1970. He was an actor and dramatist of the greatest ability.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085432,"sku":"9780948833748","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_91d9d0c2-4a36-44db-9c1d-4f1361104cbc.jpeg?v=1752237358"},{"product_id":"england-and-nowhere","title":"England and Nowhere","description":"'Thanks be that we and some things are.' Kevyn Arthur's poems celebrate the provisionality of life of a 'precarious people', 'ducking from hurricanes on little lumps of rock.' His poems, the work of 'this altered dolphin', begin with an acute awareness of time and history as the distinctive difference in humankind's relationships to nature. His sense of the Caribbean is diverse, embracing the multiformity of its traditions. He uses a pithy and provocative humour to demolish views which are partial or narrow. Here is a voice which is lively and musical, sometimes classical in form, but always energetically demotic in using a diversity of language registers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn several poems, but most explicitly in 'Excerpt from The Whole Caboodle', Kevyn Arthur opposes the cultural politics of skin for a humanism which does not think: ‘Cogito, ergo sum Aethiops’ and where his grievance against colonialism is that it ‘made me take too long to understand \/ that identity is a rudimentary fiction: that England and Barbados are Nowhere \/... and we each are the Makers of the song we all sing’ (‘England and Nowhere’).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Arthur's observations open up new vistas in the re-exploration of human possibilities... exciting.\" \u003cbr\u003eMario Relich, \u003ci\u003eLines Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Uses... great rolling, roaring tirades of slang, anger, lust, irony to powerful effect.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIron Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNovelist and poet \u003cb\u003eKevyn Arthur\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Barbados in 1942. He has worked as a journalist and as a philosophy lecturer, and currently lives in Virginia.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085456,"sku":"9780948833519","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_5effe340-4974-4ee9-ab6c-87c63445475b.jpeg?v=1752237028"},{"product_id":"sastra","title":"Sastra","description":"The pundit warns Sastra's mother that her daughter's birth signs foretell two possible karmas, one of prosperous security if she keeps to the well-tried path of obedience to tradition, the other of mixed joy and misery if she should attempt to 'fly' and follow her own desires. These are indeed Sastra's choices - between the traditional, collective Hindu society of her parents, and the world of individual destinies and responsibilities to which her generation is increasingly drawn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSet in Trinidad in the 1950s, \u003ci\u003eSastra\u003c\/i\u003e is a moving and tender love story, a rich evocation of the village world and a memorable portrayal of a brave young woman who never tries to evade or complain about the consequences of her choice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"One of the novel's most striking qualities is the assurance with which it registers inner turbulence. It often suggests a web of feeling that trembles within a framework of courtesies.\"\u003cbr\u003eMervyn Morris\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLakshmi Persaud\u003c\/b\u003e was born in 1939 in Trinidad. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eButterfly in the Wind\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSastra\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eFor the Love of My Name\u003c\/i\u003e. She lives in London.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085604,"sku":"9780948833717","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_1db7165d-d65f-4056-af6a-b906d59dbbfb.jpeg?v=1752237655"},{"product_id":"the-loneliness-of-angels","title":"The Loneliness of Angels","description":"\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Guyana Prize Caribbean Award 2011 (Fiction).\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOffering a richly nuanced portrayal placing Haiti in a global context as a place of ethnic and cultural complexity, this novel explores the role of spirituality in Caribbean life and culture. Told through multiple voices in a nonlinear fashion, the narrative unfolds through the perspectives of a Haitian-Syrian merchant, Ruth, who recounts her young adulthood and final days as she intuits her imminent death; Catherine, a professional pianist living in Paris who travels home to Haiti upon hearing of her Aunt Ruth’s murder; Rose, Catherine’s mother, an empath, who is believed to have committed suicide in Canadian exile in reaction to the worst years of the Duvalier regime; Romulus, a once famous Konpa singer and an addict, who, released by rebels from a Port-au-Prince jail searches for his redemption; and Elsie, an Irish, working-class seer who emigrates to Haiti in 1847 in search of a new mystic who will guide them all. Traversing the terrains of Port-au-Prince middle-class life, working-class French Canada, expatriate Paris, the peat bogs of famine stricken Ireland, and tracing lives that cross boundaries of time and place, this is a deeply absorbing portrayal of a fragmented community whose deepest connections lie in a shared sense of spirituality.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMyriam J. A. Chancy is a Haitian writer and scholar born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and raised in Quebec City and Winnipeg. She is also the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Scorpion's Claw\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085676,"sku":"9781845231224","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_898e76e4-430e-4770-ba90-09559d4b6ebd.jpeg?v=1752238088"},{"product_id":"intersections-1","title":"Intersections","description":"Idlewild is a place of contradiction for Frances-Marie Coke in her impressive second collection of poems, \u003ci\u003eIntersections\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLocated deep in rural Jamaica, Idlewild is a place of emotional and psychic shelter for the poet, and becomes, then a place rich with symbolic and mythic meaning, not unlike Lorna Goodison’s \u003ci\u003eHeartease\u003c\/i\u003e. In this collection, Coke traces the uncertain paths of childhood and adulthood through a sequence of poems that treat Idlewild as a character, a constant that serves as a reliable touchstone for memory. One is always aware that at the edges of many of the poems of security and pleasant memory are the haunting truths of rupture in family relations, abandonment, loneliness, resentment for the ways of unreliable men, and the challenges of a faith that must be practiced even where things are not hopeful. On such matters, Coke writes with eloquent empathy and profound insight.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA gradual unveiling takes place as the central voice of the poems matures along with her circumstances and her island. Coke is not afraid of nostalgia, but she is never sentimental in her exploration of the past because she is always acutely aware of the present - Jamaica with its poverty, violence, class divides and racial complexities. She writes about these with the same tenderness and sensitivity that she writes about the wide range of people that pass through her world - all marked by the human mix of the heroic and the pathetic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrances-Marie Coke\u003c\/b\u003e comes to us with a well-formed poetic voice, a mature and authoritative command of form and language and a surefooted sense of what makes a poem urgent and timely.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085776,"sku":"9781845230884","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_cb5f2fd7-2df7-4f9b-9be6-d9b24bc09f1f.jpeg?v=1752237027"},{"product_id":"snapshots-from-istanbul","title":"Snapshots from Istanbul","description":"Following her very well-received \u003ci\u003eFauna\u003c\/i\u003e, Jacqueline Bishop’s \u003ci\u003eSnapshots from Istanbul\u003c\/i\u003e is another leap forward in terms of developing an assured signature voice and extending the range of her subject matter. At one level, the collection has the intimacy of the confessional - recorded with self-reflexive frankness and good humour - but this is grounded within the structure of other narratives and voices that create a counterpoint of dialogue in which the lyric ‘I’ is only one point of reference. Framing the collection are poems that explore the lives of the exiled Roman poet Ovid, and the journeying painter Gaugin. Between their differing reasons for departure and between the invented Ovid’s changing perceptions of what exile means, Bishop locates her own explorations of where home might be. Like Gaugin, Bishop is driven by the need to discover one’s necessity and do it; but as a woman she also has room to wonder about those abandoned by such quests.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the heart of the collection is a sequence of powerfully sensuous poems about a doomed relationship in Istanbul, touching in its honesty and, as in the best poems about other places, vivid in its portrayal of the otherness, highly conscious of the layers of difference, and aware that the poems’ true subject is the uprooted self. Here, inevitably, Bishop is forced to think about her Americanness and her Jamaicanness in different ways.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is one constant: the drive to rearrange words, which is both about and is the act of the rearranging of self.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJacqueline Bishop\u003c\/b\u003e was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. She now lives and works in New York City ... the 15th parish of Jamaica. \u003ci\u003eThe River's Song is her first novel\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085792,"sku":"9781845231149","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_d3706f1f-196c-4697-8043-53a38a1d6e00.jpeg?v=1752237027"},{"product_id":"the-island-quintet-five-stories","title":"The Island Quintet: Five Stories","description":"Raymond Ramcharitar’s vision is rooted in Trinidad, but as a globalised island with permeable borders, frequent birds of passage, and outposts in New York and London. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the collection’s outstanding qualities is that it is both utterly contemporary and written with a profound and disturbed sense of the history that shapes the island. 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Naipaul’s \u003ci\u003eThe Mimic Men\u003c\/i\u003e, but is written with the anger and the compassion of a writer for whom the island still means everything. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the novella, 'Froude’s Arrow', Ramcharitar has written a profound fiction that tells us where the Caribbean currently is in juxtaposing the deep, still to be answered questions about island existence (the fragmentations wrought by history, the challenges of smallness in the global market, race and class divides) and the scrabbling for survival, fame and fortune that arouse the ire of Ramcharitar’s acerbic and satirical vision.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRaymond Ramcharitar\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Trinidad. He worked as a journalist and is the author of a controversial and provocative study of the deficiencies of the Trinidadian press, \u003ci\u003eBreaking the News: Media \u0026amp; Culture in Trinidad\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085916,"sku":"9781845230753","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_9f4a40e0-a442-4fce-a07c-7b9e416fac23.jpeg?v=1752237358"},{"product_id":"sections-of-an-orange","title":"Sections of an Orange","description":"Anton Nimblett’s stories are about characters driven by desire - for dignity and justice for a dead son, for privacy from a neighbour who collects lives, for sexual fulfilment as a gay man, for an old man’s last assertion of love for a dying wife, for a man on the edge trying to block out the destructive voices of past pains. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat is so impressive about the stories, beyond Anton Nimblett’s sharp ear for a wide range of distinctive voices, and the ability to create vividly sensual pictures of place, and particularly of erotic encounters, is their facility in inhabiting contrary tendencies without strain. There is also an expert cinematographer’s sense of when to cut and when to join, and several stories build to powerful dramatic tension through arresting montage. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWithin the collection there is both fluidity and sharp definition. Characters migrate between stories (just as they migrate between Trinidad and New York), being sometimes at the fringes, sometimes at the centre - Trinidadian lives seen both in motion and at rest. 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She writes with the directness of the reggae lyric, with both pungency and humour, and with an aphoristic economy which has the art of saying more with less. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer poems encompass the lives of women old and young; middle-class and sufferers; women whose lives are enclosed, who want liberation from the 'station of motherhood, wifehood and frustration', and women who through their resistance, creativity and assertion of selfhood have made space for themselves. The celebration of such lives stands as a beacon of hope in the depiction of Jamaican society in which rape, poverty and abandonment are too frequently women's lot.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJean Goulbourne\u003c\/b\u003e grew up in rural Jamaica. She has worked as a teacher and a publications officer. 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These qualities are deepened in this new collection, where the whiff of mortality demands an even stronger sense of continuance, affirmation and joy in love, family, music, art and, above all, in his beloved Jamaica. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn these poems of quirky, unassuming observations, McKenzie never preaches, but he does find sermons in lilies, and what he discovers for himself provides a way of wisdom for those readers inclined to look for it. And beyond the personal, he locates the sources of endurance in his grasp of Jamaican\/Caribbean history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eEarl McKenzie\u003c\/b\u003e was born and lives in Jamaica. ","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041085992,"sku":"9781845230128","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_08b99d9e-880c-4075-a804-11a1cef6fb83.jpeg?v=1752237026"},{"product_id":"caribbean-treasure-a-trove-of-18th-century-barbadian-poetry-and-prose-volume-1","title":"Caribbean Treasure: A Trove of 18th Century Barbadian Poetry and Prose, Volume 1","description":"It was natural for the first nationalist phase of Caribbean writing to believe that it began from nothing. That was true in the sense that those who wrote in the twentieth century had little idea of what had gone before. Now Kevyn Arthur’s investigation and meticulous editing of 18th century Barbadian newspapers and journals reveals there was, existing side by side with the horrors of slavery, a lively and heterogeneous literary world that begins to explore what it means to be Barbadian. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis was, after all, a country that in 1651 had declared its independence from Cromwellian Britain and negotiated a treaty that gave it a degree of autonomy that influenced similar moves in the American colonies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy the 1730s, when the publisher, printer and first collector of the material in this volume, the fascinating Samuel Keimer (frequently jailed in Britain for his anti-royalist libels), arrived in Barbados, it was an island in which amateur theatre flourished, there was a literary society, artists painted and Doctor Towne had published a treatise on West Indian diseases. It did not have a press, and Keimer, once employer of Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, and then conclusively undermined by him, met that need by establishing the \u003ci\u003eBarbados Gazette\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003eThis first volume of \u003ci\u003eCaribbean Treasure\u003c\/i\u003e draws from issues of the Gazette published between 1731-1738, and later collected by Keimer in his Caribbeana, published in 1741. These newspapers contained much literary material, a feature dear to Keimer’s heart. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere are poems, satires, essays and letters in the style of the Spectator, and other materials that give a vivid picture of the life of that time. 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He has worked as a journalist and as a philosophy lecturer, and currently lives in Virginia.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53675017339265,"sku":"9781845230104","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_456364d0-1b0d-49a8-8ac7-44289da8e955.jpeg?v=1752238198"},{"product_id":"after-image","title":"After-Image","description":"In \u003ci\u003eAfter-image\u003c\/i\u003e, Dennis Scott displays in ever more refined, pared-down ways the qualities that, in his previous collections, established him as a major Caribbean poet. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is his acute intelligence, seriousness worn lightly, and meticulous craft with sound and the appearance of the poem on the page. There is his resolute integrity as a Black and Caribbean poet with a sense of multiple inheritances who refuses to be conscripted into any sentimental or monolithic stance, who goes ‘among the fashionable drums\/trying to keep true my own blood’s subtle beat’. There is the warm humanity of his poems about love and the nourishment of his marriage. There is his actor’s ability to get under the skin of those he observes, to see ‘so many tales\/ in every silent face’, his sense of the masks and rituals, the significance of tiny movements in the interactions between people. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eParticularly arresting in \u003ci\u003eAfter-image\u003c\/i\u003e, poems drawn from the wealth of manuscripts left by Scott after his untimely death in 1991, and edited by his friend and fellow poet, Mervyn Morris, are those that focus on his own coming death, his hope\/confidence that ‘when this machine is dead\/ the poems it made will flare\/ wild...’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eScott’s work is acknowledged as one of the major influences on the direction of Caribbean theatre. He died at the early age of fifty-one in 1991.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041086708,"sku":"9781845230241","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_8fd877e4-22ed-4aa6-b0bc-4fca657e8ef8.jpeg?v=1752237025"},{"product_id":"wings-of-a-stranger","title":"Wings of a Stranger","description":"In the continuing rite of return to his native Barbados from longer and longer away, something has happened for Tony Kellman. No longer are these the alienated poems of the long gap, of belonging nowhere. With greater establishment in America has come, on the wings of a stranger, the capacity to embrace this past and to see wholly afresh what was once familiar and unremarked. Parallel to these poems of place, are those that explore new love and its power to heal and renew vision.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs well as Barbados, there are poems set in worlds as different as sharecropping Georgia and Yorkshire, England. In all of them one hears Kellman’s signal voice which combines his urbane capacity to ‘hum forever simple pleasure’ and the ecstatic vision of a poet who ‘puts on the garment of praise’ to ‘retell our special story’.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePart of the freshness of retelling is rooted in Kellman’s explorations of the rhythms of Barbadian popular music, particularly the Tuk band, his confident use of the ancestral to make the new.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAnthony Kellman\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Barbados. He currently teaches at Augusta College, Georgia.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041086728,"sku":"9781900715447","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_70885458-dbf1-456b-8d38-699bd1ad3f37.jpeg?v=1752237024"},{"product_id":"illustrious-exile-journal-of-my-sojourn-in-the-west-indies-by-robert-burns-esq-commenced-on-the-first-day-of-july-1786","title":"Illustrious Exile: Journal of my Sojourn in the West Indies by Robert Burns, Esq. Commenced on the first day of July 1786","description":"In 1786, the Scottish poet Robert Burns, penniless and needing to escape the consequences of his complicated love life, accepted the position of book-keeper on an estate in Jamaica. The success of his Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect made this escape unnecessary. Thus far is historical fact. In Andrew Lindsay’s novel, Burns indeed goes to Jamaica and then to the Dutch colony of Demerara where, into the world of sugar and slavery, he brought his propensity for falling in love, his humanity and his urge to write poetry. In 1997 a small mahogany chest is found in a Wai Wai Amerindian village in Guyana. It contains Burns’ journal from 1786 to 1796, when he died. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAndrew Lindsay’s novel is a work of imaginative invention, poetic description and meticulous historical reconstruction. As a fellow Scot who has settled in Guyana, Lindsay brings an incomer’s fresh eye to the Caribbean landscape and imaginative insights into how Burns as a man of his times might have responded to slavery. Not least, \u003ci\u003eIllustrious Exile\u003c\/i\u003e contains some brilliant versions of Burns’ poems, as written in the Caribbean.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAndrew O. Lindsay\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Scotland and now splits his time between Fife and Guyana. \u003ci\u003eIllustrious Exile\u003c\/i\u003e is his first novel.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041086780,"sku":"9781845230289","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_f98181ff-0ed5-40d9-9d14-405bdd6b4f4c.jpeg?v=1752237654"},{"product_id":"slave-song","title":"Slave Song","description":"\u003ci\u003eSlave Song\u003c\/i\u003e is unquestionably one of the most important collections of Caribbean\/Black British poetry to have been published in the last twenty years. On its first publication in 1984 it won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and established Dabydeen as a provocative and paradigm-shifting writer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the heart of \u003ci\u003eSlave Song\u003c\/i\u003e are the voices of African slaves and Indian labourers expressing, in a Guyanese Creole that is as far removed from Standard English as it is possible to get, their songs of defiance, of a thwarted erotic energy. But surrounding this harsh and lyrical core of Creole expression is an elaborate critical apparatus of translations (which deliberately reveal the actual untranslatability of the Creole) and a parody of the kind of critical commentary that does no more than paraphrase or at best contextualise the original poem. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt took some time for the displaced critics to recognise that this prosaic apparatus was as much part of the meaning of the whole as the poems themselves, that Dabydeen was engaged in a play of masks, an expression of his own duality and a critique of the relationship which is at the core of Caribbean writing: that between the articulate writer and the supposedly voiceless workers and peasants.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis new edition has an afterword by David Dabydeen that briefly explores his response to these poems after more than twenty years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDavid Dabydeen\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041086792,"sku":"9781845230043","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_a6fa891d-5cff-49ec-8780-3928ab2dc1e0.jpeg?v=1752237024"},{"product_id":"high-house-and-radio","title":"High House and Radio","description":"The backdam people of Lusignan Estate have left the sugar company's cramped barrack housing and moved to their own individual houses in Annandale Village. They enjoy better conditions, freedom from interference by the estate authorities and more involvement in the wider life of Guyana. But something has gone - the old closeness, the old certainties - as the people exchange their communal life for their own separate 'high houses', and the coherent Indianness of the estate days is challenged by the new messages brought by the radio, politicians and 'clap-hand' Christians.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn these stories of trade unionists, cooks, cricketers, political activists, rogues and small boys, Monar creates a vivid, picaresque world of people struggling to make sense of changes which they are experiencing at the deepest levels of consciousness. The same character who invests his energies in trickster strategems can also cry out in depair, 'No meaning, no purpose. O Gawd is where yuh deh?' In focusing on the 1950s and 1960s, several of the stories confront the tendency towards amnesia with regard to the outbreak of ethnic conflict between the Indians of Annandale and the Africans of neighbouring Buxton. The last story in the collection reflects on the next stage of the journey as the former backdam people begin to leave Guyana for new lives in Britain. These stories are told in the creole voices of their characters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRooplall Monar\u003c\/b\u003e was born on the Lusignan sugar estate in Guyana in 1945. Apart from brief overseas visits he has lived in Guyana all his life, in Annandale village, East Coast Demerara.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041086980,"sku":"9780948833120","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_ea91d746-fdc6-4740-a0e0-ed1253cebd89.jpeg?v=1752237357"},{"product_id":"the-garden-of-forgetting","title":"The Garden of Forgetting","description":"At the core of this collection are poems that chart the attempt to come to terms with the life shattering loss of two relationships: father and husband. They explore with a great exactness the connections between inner feelings and the physical context for those feelings: the Jamaican landscape, and the promptings of external phenomena to memory. They ‘sip the brine of loss: proof that I have lived’.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThough in one sense Gwyneth Barber Wood writes against the grain of much recent Jamaican poetry by writing almost exclusively in standard English (the one occasion when she uses nation language is all the more powerful by contrast) and using traditional forms of verse, her poems are intensely Jamaican. Those poems that are set in England are almost wholly defined by Jamaican absences. A London silence becomes all the more empty as the memory of ‘someone’s bashment in the valley welled\/ up in my head.’ Elsewhere there is a careful attention to the quality of Jamaican light that subtly maps shifts of mood, as when the shadow of the dying day ‘creases the backs of hills’, where what has once been solid becomes fragile and subject to change.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eGwyneth Barber Wood\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Kingston, Jamaica. Her work has been regularly appearing in the literary section of the \u003ci\u003eJamaican Observer\u003c\/i\u003e and in 2001 she was awarded a Fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087012,"sku":"9781845230074","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_28bf3701-59ed-4a68-b512-76549c56ca53.jpeg?v=1752237023"},{"product_id":"lady-in-a-boat","title":"Lady in a Boat","description":"In poems that express an oblique and resonant disquiet ('people dream of a lady\/ in a boat, dressed in red\/ petticoat, adrift and weeping') and a sequence that addresses memories of the death of the Grenadian revolution, too painful to confront until now, Merle Collins writes of a Caribbean adrift, amnesiac and in danger of nihilistic despair. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut she also achieves a life-enhancing and consoling perspective on those griefs. She does this by revisiting the hopes and humanities of the people involved, recreating them in all their concrete particularity, or by speaking through the voice of an eighty-year-old woman 'making miracle\/ with little money because turn hand is life lesson', and in writing poems that celebrate love, the world of children and the splendours of Caribbean nature. Her poems take the 'new dead ancestors back to\/ mountain to feed the fountain\/ of dreams again.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMerle Collins\u003c\/b\u003e is Grenadian. She is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories and two previous collections of poetry. 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Then criticism focused on his innovations in the language of narrative and Maureen Warner-Lewis’s essay is one of the most brilliant in this framework, demonstrating just how sophisticated and artful was Selvon’s play with language register.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnother tendency was to treat Selvon’s work as expressing a West Indianness that subsumed his own Indo-Caribbean origins. Harold Barrett’s essay shows by close analysis that Selvon’s treatment of Indianness always suggests the necessity for it to become part of the Caribbean whole, but without in any sense becoming subsumed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMajor cultural theorists such as Kamau Brathwaite and Antonio Benitez-Rojo have begun to delineate a specifically Caribbean aesthetics, and the essay by John Thieme shows how central Selvon’s work is to this project in its use of the archetype of carnival.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMore recent postmodernist treatments of Selvon have seized on the ironic play with intertextuality in his later novels in a way which loses sight of underlying patterns of meaning and social commitment. John Stephen Martin’s essay is a salutary restatement of Selvon’s humanist philosophy. In short, the essays in this collection both advance the depth of appreciation and understanding of Selvon’s fiction and present an admirably balanced range of approaches towards it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMartin Zehnder\u003c\/b\u003e lectures at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53675017273729,"sku":"9781900715737","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_312db721-ac76-4938-814d-a1beb5abed63.jpeg?v=1752238134"},{"product_id":"horizons","title":"Horizons","description":"Stanley Greaves brings a painter’s perceptions and a musician’s ear to the writing of this substantial selection of his poetry written over the past forty years. He describes his painting as ‘a kind of allegorical story-telling’ and the same kind of connections between the concrete and the metaphysical, and the presence of the extraordinary in the ordinary are found in his poems.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGreaves guesses at a background that includes African, Amerindian and European ancestry, but declines to relate to any of these in an exclusive way. Rather he writes out of a creole sensibility that celebrates Guyanese diversity: Afro-Guyanese folkways, Amerindian legend and Hindu philosophy. Nor does he reject Europe, and in his poetry and his painting explores connections between European Surrealism and the intuitive elements within Guyana’s heterogeneous culture.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo enter the collection is to discover a whole, self-created world of Blakean richness, one which is never static, but growing to encompass new elements. Greaves’s is a dialectical vision, alert both to the movements of history and the minutiae of daily change.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis themes include family, daily life, metaphysical speculation, the hard years of social collapse and political repression in Guyana, the strange visitations of inner imaginative life and his comradeship with the great Guyanese poet Martin Carter. His is a sensibility ‘welcoming as the earth is\/ for every floating seed\/ on stairs of air and rain’.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis collection won the 2002 Guyana Prize for the best first collection of poetry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eStanley Greaves\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Guyana. He is one of the Caribbean’s most distinguished artists and an accomplished classical guitarist. He currently lives in Barbados.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087252,"sku":"9781900715577","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_fc84f4be-52cd-4c30-974d-033885ba29ad.jpeg?v=1752237654"},{"product_id":"contributions-towards-the-resolution-of-conflict-in-guyana","title":"Contributions Towards the Resolution of Conflict in Guyana","description":"From 1955 onwards, when the anti-colonial movement split into competing ethnic sections, conflict between African and Indian Guyanese has held Guyana in a deadlock which has undermined all attempts at social and economic development. At its height exploding into civil war in the 1960s, the constant state of tension has led to rigged elections, authoritarian government, economic collapse and driven hundreds of thousands of Guyanese to emigrate. Even in the present, when for the first time for decades, free and fair elections can be held, winning and losing further divides the nation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJudaman Seecoomar’s book offers an analysis of how Guyana has arrived at this impasse and suggests a process that could lead out of it. He identifies a history of authoritarian government where those who control the state (whether colonial governments in the past, those who seized power through rigged elections, or those who gained it by virtue of having the support of the ethnic majority), have responded to Guyana’s cultural pluralism by suppressing or ignoring the interests of the minority. He argues that the failure to satisfy the human needs of all Guyana’s ethnic groups is the root cause of conflict and only their satisfaction offers a means of harnessing all the nation’s energies for development. He identifies the crucial needs as being those that relate to security, the recognition of cultural identity, participation in decision-making and the fair distribution of social rewards.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe book looks to the developing practice of conflict resolution through strategies of collaborative problem solving. It argues that such a process would offer Guyana the means of finding constitutional and institutional arrangements acceptable to all ethnic groups. It provides both an account of the theoretical frameworks for such an approach and case studies of conflict resolution in action in Northern Ireland and in the Oslo talks between Israelis and Palestinians. It documents the initial attempts by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to broker talks between the main Guyanese political parties.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a world where internal conflict in multi-ethnic states is the major source of regional instability, this is a timely book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJudaman Seecoomar\u003c\/b\u003e was born July 15 1932; he died March 26 2006. He had recently completed a PhD on inter-racial conflict in Guyana.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087268,"sku":"9781900715652","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_a6d73862-04f3-4620-943d-7249f569788a.jpeg?v=1752238150"},{"product_id":"caribs-leap","title":"Carib's Leap","description":"\u003ci\u003eCarib’s Leap\u003c\/i\u003e brings together work from a dozen previous collections, and major new poems including those on the Big Drum Dance of Carriacou, poems that are alight with almost forty years of imaginative involvement with the Caribbean.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLaurence Lieberman\u003c\/b\u003e is an American poet with deep Caribbean affiliations. He has published twelve collections of poetry and three volumes of literary essays.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087712,"sku":"9781845230227","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_388e01a8-7143-4445-a71c-efee0c719172.jpeg?v=1752237653"},{"product_id":"mother-jackson-murders-the-moon","title":"Mother Jackson Murders the Moon","description":"A vivid cast of characters throng these poems. There is Mother Jackson, the ole hige who lays out her thoughts like a mortician, who is both creator and destroyer. There are the players of the Rootsman Theatre of the Absurd, such as fallen politician Julian Lapith, who knows too well the power of incantation; Dub Deacon Lapith with his Sankey soul; poor Bedward Lapith with his millenarian dreams of flight; Busha Godhead self swoopsing down to intervene in human affairs and - the heroine of the cast - Aliveyah, to whom nature speaks direct by the nudge of a beak.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd there is, of course, their creator, Miss G.E., who shares with us the 'rockstone passion of a Jamaican country bumpkin born and nurtured in Arcadia'. Whether in her celebrations of domestic happiness in a house where even the chairs talk, or in her satires on Jamaican life, Gloria Escoffery writes with a visionary intensity and fantastical imagination which is all her own. And though she feels it is no joke to be three people - old woman, young girl and child - who don't quite understand one another, Miss G.E. cannot but write her love letter to the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e[b]Gloria Escoffery[\/b] was born in 1923. She has worked as a teacher, written extensively on Jamaican art and is one of her country's finest painters.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087752,"sku":"9781900715249","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_5ae9be19-7d0f-4020-9ec6-17e891567fad.jpeg?v=1752237022"},{"product_id":"the-view-from-belmont","title":"The View from Belmont","description":"\u003ci\u003eThe View from Belmont\u003c\/i\u003e tells two stories: one through the letters of a young English widow who takes over her husband's cocoa estate in Trinidad in 1823; the other through the responses of a group of contemporary Trinidadians who are reading the letters at the time of the 1990 Muslimeen attempted coup. Clara's letters present the insights of a perceptive, independent-minded and generous-spirited young woman, who is nevertheless wholly committed to the institution of slavery. The letters give a sharp sense of Trinidadian society in the process of formation, but at their heart is an account of Clara's relationships with those with whom she shares her life on the estate, in particular Kano, a 'loyal' slave who she takes to her bed. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor the contemporary Trinidadians, the letters raise troubling questions about the nature of the national psyche, the absence of social consensus and the extent to which the history of that period still shapes the present. Is Clara a 'worthless white bitch - no different from any of them men who was screwing their slave women' or a sensible woman taking charge of her life and looking for companionship? This is a comic, painful and moving novel. Its presentation of the cruelties, violence and affections of everyday relations under slavery raise questions not only about the nature of Caribbean societies, but the nature of history and its interpretation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNovelist and poet \u003cb\u003eKevyn Arthur\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Barbados in 1942. 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For rastafarian Akete, the dig is going to be part of his mission to bring a sense of their African heritage to his fellow sufferers in the ghetto, and for Carla the excavations on the site of the Big House and the slave quarters are potent reminders that her own ancestry is both black and white. For the two young Americans who join them, the dig is the first chance to put their archaeological skills into practice in an exotic new environment.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEach of the diverse group of people brought together by the dig is changed by the experience, the result both of their encounters with the relics of history, and the personal encounters within the group. This is a dramatic and poetically written exploration of the interaction of past and present, and of the issues of age, race and gender which the excavation provokes. For all of the group there is the stark contrast between the beauty of the poetically evoked Jamaican landscape and the dark secrets lying underneath it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Jean Goulbourne’s \u003ci\u003eExcavation\u003c\/i\u003e gives a refreshing perspective on a subject that has long troubled the West Indies - the nature of identity in a multiracial society haunted by a history of colonialism...Goulbourne’s writing style is stimulating - especially in the portrayal of the island’s landscape - and as she draws the reader into the lives of her characters, we gain a fresh perspective on West Indian culture, history, and politics.\"\u003cbr\u003eGeoffrey Philp, \u003ci\u003eThe Caribbean Writer\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eJean Goulbourne\u003c\/b\u003e grew up in rural Jamaica. She has worked as a teacher and a publications officer. She was the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship and an honorary fellowship at the Iowa Institute of Writing Programme.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087820,"sku":"9781900715119","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_0c945c60-ccc3-4242-af6d-28ea43c5ac12.jpeg?v=1752237021"},{"product_id":"the-art-of-david-dabydeen","title":"The Art of David Dabydeen","description":"David Dabydeen is from the younger generation of Caribbean writers living in Britain. His work has been highly praised for its originality and imaginative depth. In this volume, leading scholars from Europe, North America and the Caribbean discuss his poetry and fiction in the context of the politics and culture of Britain and the Caribbean. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese studies explore David Dabydeen's concern with the plurality of Caribbean experience, with its African, Indian, Amerindian and European roots; the dislocation of slavery and indenture; migration and the consequent divisions in the Caribbean psyche. In particular, these essays focus on Dabydeen's aesthetic practice as a consciously post-colonial writer; his exploration of the contrasts between rural creole and standard English and their different world visions; the power of language to subvert accepted realities; his use of multiple masks as ways of dealing with issues of identity and the use of destabilizing techniques in the narrative strategies he employs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This is the first book about David Dabydeen and the first book in a series to be devoted to British Caribbean authors, by which is meant writers born in the Caribbean but resident in England. It is an extremely useful work consisting of three interviews and nine essays on the subject’s poetry and novels, followed by a bibliography of books and articles by Dabydeen and a list of reviews of his creative work. Part of the usefulness is that the essays overlap, build on, and disagree with one another. They bring out Dabydeen’s recurring themes, autobiographical material, and the links among his scholarly publications, interviews, and creative writings. The authors know Dabydeen, and some were his students or colleagues, which is reflected in the way that what were perhaps offhand remarks are passed on as truths.\"\u003cbr\u003eBruce King, \u003ci\u003eWorld Literature Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eKevin Grant\u003c\/b\u003e read English at Middlesex University and did research at the University of Warwick for a book on Asians in Britain, focusing on the BCCI collapse.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087844,"sku":"9781900715102","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_68fa0d94-9e85-42f3-86c2-e6e89d1c50bb.jpeg?v=1752238087"},{"product_id":"turner","title":"Turner","description":"David Dabydeen’s \u003ci\u003eTurner\u003c\/i\u003e is a long narrative poem written in response to JMW Turner’s celebrated painting ‘Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead \u0026amp; Dying’. Dabydeen’s poem focuses on what is hidden in Turner’s painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned man’s unspoken desires, including the resisted temptation to fabricate an idyllic past, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner’s painting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTurner\u003c\/i\u003e was described Caryl Phillips as \"a major poem, full of lyricism and compassion, which gracefully shoulders the burden of history and introduces us to voices from the past whose voices we have all inherited\", and by Hanif Kureishi as \"Magnificent, vivid and original.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn addition to the title poems, \u003ci\u003eTurner\u003c\/i\u003e contains selections from David Dabydeen's two earlier books, \u003ci\u003eSlave Song\u003c\/i\u003e (1984) and \u003ci\u003eCoolie Odyssey\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDavid Dabydeen\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087864,"sku":"9781900715683","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_26f352bd-f96b-4e72-95a7-a6930a682cdd.jpeg?v=1752237021"},{"product_id":"the-writer-and-his-wife-and-other-stories","title":"The Writer and his Wife and Other Stories","description":"'The way I see it, a country with a stupid shape like this one can't have too much smart people in it.' On the contrary, as Reuben's diatribe reveals, 'paper-bag shaped' Trinidad is full of schemers and dreamers. Maharaj's characters struggle heroically, though sometimes comically and oddly, to make their mark on the earth. It is as if the more frustrating their outward circumstances, the more intense their inner lives.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBashir Ali, the librarian, has developed an intimate relationship with his books, and a passionate hatred of their borrowers. 'Bhaji and rice! You put bhaji and rice on top of Virginia!' Hoobnath Hingoo, the metalwork technician, imagines a dire fate for the arrogant young engineers who lord it around the oil refinery. 'Barbecue the whole side of them. Grill them nice and black. Afterwards we could have a sale. Grill engineers. Going cheap. Eat as much as you like...' And of course there is Roop, the writer, who wants to escape from his gas station 'to write that book... about everything I ever thought of since I born.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnyone who enjoys the comedies of V.S. Naipaul will find great pleasure in Maharaj's elegant and arresting style, but they will also find in Maharaj a profound empathy and understanding of his characters and their world. In the process, he gives a rewarding and insightful portrayal of the Indo-Trinidadian world in the late 20th century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRabindranth Maharaj\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Trinidad. He now lives and teaches in Toronto. Several further collections of his stories have been published in Canada.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087888,"sku":"9780948833816","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_4d8d2af2-082c-4b87-9541-00b3a6444f5c.jpeg?v=1752237356"},{"product_id":"duppies","title":"Duppies","description":"These poems grow out of the persistence of Brown's memories of childhood in rural Jamaica - the twilight world of duppies and rolling calf and minds inhabiting both Protestantism and obeah. After thirty years in North America, the stubborn endurance of these haunting presences, an apparent maladjustment to the present, comes to signify a complex sense of ancestry and spiritual continuity. They represent, too, a last line of defence against the homogenising sweep of American cultural imperialism. Whilst 'belonging is yesterday's faint memory', these poems are intensely alive, sometimes meditative, sometimes angry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLloyd W. Brown\u003c\/b\u003e graduated from UWI, Mona in 1961. Since then he has taught in Canada and the USA. He is the author of the study West Indian Poetry, amongst other critical titles.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087948,"sku":"9780948833830","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_c01fa7c4-86ef-491e-9060-592cdba5816d.jpeg?v=1752237020"},{"product_id":"berbice-crossing","title":"Berbice Crossing","description":"Cyril Dabydeen brings a poet's vision to these stories which span the crossing between the Caribbean and North America. They have a surface of gritty realism, but move inwards to explore the hidden dreams and latent capacities of his characters. Whether in the unsettling landscapes of rural Berbice in Guyana (with its ferocious crocodiles and even a spliff-toting Rasta), the wilderness of the Canadian North, or the urban melting pot of Toronto, Dabydeen's characters are memorably alert to what makes them feel either at home or alien in their various landscapes. Ranging from the extremely funny to the tragic, these stories are full of poetry, tension and sometimes terror. Cyril Dabydeen involves the reader creatively in a world of shifting grounds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCyril Dabydeen\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041087976,"sku":"9780948833694","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_2887ea0a-5888-418b-9981-9b5e3fbfc981.jpeg?v=1752237355"},{"product_id":"progeny-of-air","title":"Progeny of Air","description":"'... here in the shadow of the Connors Sardine Factory\u003cbr\u003eShe spawns her progeny of air and dies.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe juxtaposition of images of the salmon's sordid entrapment on a Canadian factory farm, images of its spiritual fulfilment (or nullity) and the tensions between its instincts for freedom and return offer a concentrated motif for this remarkable collection. In making his own return of memory from Canada and South Carolina to a childhood and youth in 1970s Jamaica (in particular as a student of Jamaica College), Kwame Dawes' poems display a powerful narrative thrust, an appealing sense of humour, a gift for characterisation and an acute sense of time and place.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWinner of the prize for the best first collection in the Forward Poetry Prize of 1994, \u003ci\u003eProgeny of Air\u003c\/i\u003e links inner personal experience and social and historical perspectives to mutually enriching effect. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eProgeny of Air\u003c\/i\u003e takes its title from a single poem describing a fishing trip, referring to the life cycle of the salmon, both actual and hypothetical. This also neatly reflects the themes and concerns of the collection: movement and the impulse of natural energy; the need to go back and revisit meaningful times and places in one's life; a way of living an authentic life, the possibility of growth and self-awareness. The leap and dash of the salmon is also caught in the poetry's musical rhythms and striking language. I am grateful to Kwame Dawes for writing this book and bringing some heat to a grey and chilly autumn. Peepal Tree are bringing out two further books, I look forward to seeing what else this man can do.\"\u003cbr\u003eLinda France, \u003ci\u003ePoetry Review\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eKwame Dawes\u003c\/b\u003e is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041088000,"sku":"9780948833687","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_514ec740-c538-4bff-a96b-610fa38d4207.jpeg?v=1752237020"},{"product_id":"florida-bound","title":"Florida Bound","description":"Geoffrey Philp's poems of exasperation and longing explore a reluctance to leave Jamaica and the 'marl-white roads at Struie' and anger that 'blackman still can't live in him own\/black land' where 'gunman crawl like bedbug'. But whilst poems explore the keeness and sorrows of an exile's memory, the new landscape of South Florida landscape fully engages the poet's imagination. The experience of journeying is seen as part of a larger pattern of restless but creative movement in the Americas. Philp joins other Caribbean poets in making use of nation language, but few have pushed the collision between roots language and classical forms to greater effect.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Philp weaves dialect and landscape into his lines with subtle authority. It is easy to get caught up in the content and miss the grace of his technique.\"\u003cbr\u003eCarrol Fleming, \u003ci\u003eThe Caribbean Writer\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eGeoffrey Philp\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041088068,"sku":"9780948833823","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_1fa275dd-382f-432b-8895-954d423cc2c7.jpeg?v=1752237019"},{"product_id":"mount-vesuvius-in-eight-frames","title":"Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames","description":"\u003ci\u003eMount Vesuvius in Eight Frames\u003c\/i\u003e is a slim volume containing eight poems by Sudeep Sen and eight etchings by Peter Standen. The poems are meditations on the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, which destroyed the Italian city of Pompeii, and the etchings provide pictorial representations of the love-death nexus on which these meditations focus. Together the poems and the etchings evoke an ironic vision of the perennial \"macabreness\" of the Vesuvian catastrophe. Between them they conjure up an intriguing \"idyll\" of unlamented mortality, with neither solemnity nor sentimentality attending on the singular phenomenon of death dreaming of life.\"\u003cbr\u003eJoseph John, \u003ci\u003eWorld Literature Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSudeep Sen\u003c\/b\u003e lives and works in New Delhi \u0026amp; London. He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041088104,"sku":"9780948833915","price":6.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_330b23b9-4b53-47ce-b0ac-b88a66a0c881.jpeg?v=1752236769"},{"product_id":"the-twelve-foot-neon-woman","title":"The Twelve Foot Neon Woman","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eShortlisted for the 2012 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLoretta Collins Klobah sends us a twelve-foot woman with red neon surging through her veins, who boldly and gracefully takes on the challenges of urban life. Keen observer and witness, our warner woman turns her electric gaze to the everyday world and its extraordinary people. Against a soundtrack of world music, from salsa to reggae to jazz, and in a vibrant blend of English, Spanish and patois, she delivers by turns tender and incendiary hymns of homage to the Caribbean, American and British metropolis. Splendid, though endangered, nature and the spirit-world pervade the city, offering green-hearted hope for the future.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLoretta Collins Klobah\u003c\/strong\u003e lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she is a Professor of Caribbean Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Puerto Rico. She was one of eight poets featured in the anthology \u003cem\u003eNew Caribbean Poetry\u003c\/em\u003e, edited by Kei Miller (Carcanet, 2007), and her poetry was also anthologised in the 1996 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her poetry and scholarly essays have been published widely in the Caribbean, the UK and the US.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041088152,"sku":"9781845231842","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_f3e84ac8-ef54-4096-8c5c-5c04762845ef.jpeg?v=1752237355"},{"product_id":"painting-away-regrets","title":"Painting Away Regrets","description":"When Crystal and Donald meet they are two modern, urban professionals, caught n the currents of life and fundamentally unsuited to one another, but bound by the one thing they have in common: powerful sexual desires. Marriage and four children later, Crystal and Donald are at a crossroads. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFramed by the Yoruba belief system, the novel dances between the real-life drama that unfolds between Crystal and Donald and the spiritual fantasy world of the Orishas, where every human act has a spiritual ramification. Moving between California, Africa and the Caribbean, \u003ci\u003ePainting Away Regrets\u003c\/i\u003e is a compelling story of love, betrayal, madness and reconciliation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Solid, visceral, important... written with integrity and love.”\u003cbr\u003eAlice Walker, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Color Purple\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eOpal Palmer Adisa\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Jamaica, but has lived and worked in the US for almost forty years. She won a Pushcart Prize in 1987 for her short story ‘Duppy Get Her’. She is the author of twelve books, including the poetry collections \u003ci\u003eCaribbean Passion\u003c\/i\u003e (2004) and \u003ci\u003eI Name Me Name\u003c\/i\u003e (2008), and the short-story collection \u003ci\u003eUntil Judgment Comes\u003c\/i\u003e (2007); all three are published by Peepal Tree. More recently she co-edited the anthology \u003ci\u003eCaribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose and Essays\u003c\/i\u003e with Donna Weir-Soley (Peepal Tree, 2010). She has taught at several universities including Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the editor of the \u003ci\u003eCaribbean Writer\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041088220,"sku":"9781845231521","price":15.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_532d2e79-1b6d-42e7-a827-5afa489a80bc.jpeg?v=1752238176"},{"product_id":"wheels","title":"Wheels","description":"Using the power of language to explore and discover patterns of meaning, this stunning and ambitious collection brings the lyric poem face to face with the external world, with its politics, social upheavals, and ideological complexity. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhether it is a poem about a near victim of the Lockerbie bombing reflecting on the nature of grace, a president considering the function of art, or a Rastafarian defending his faith, the selections all seek illumination and understanding in the world. Using images from Garcia Marquez’s novels, accounts of slave rebellions, passages from the Book of Ezekiel, the art of modernist painters and wall-to-wall news coverage, Dawes creates a striking series of poems that are about finding pathways of meaning, and the quest for love and faith.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eKwame Dawes\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Ghana in 1962 but grew up in Jamaica. He is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. A poet, actor, editor, critic, musician and professor of English, he is the author of 17 books. He was awarded a Pushcart Prize for Poetry in 2001. His poetry collections include \u003ci\u003eProgeny of Air\u003c\/i\u003e (Peepal Tree, 1994), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, \u003ci\u003eShook Foil: A Collection of Reggae Poetry\u003c\/i\u003e (Peepal Tree, 1997) and \u003ci\u003eMap-Maker\u003c\/i\u003e (Smith\/Doorstop, 2000), winner of the The Poetry Business Prize. His \u003ci\u003eNew and Selected Poems, 1994-2002\u003c\/i\u003e was published by Peepal Tree in 2002. He recently edited the acclaimed anthology \u003ci\u003eRed: Contemporary Black British Poetry\u003c\/i\u003e (Peepal Tree, 2010).","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041088336,"sku":"9781845231422","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_a4a64b0f-9f0a-47f7-a617-1773adf08df5.jpeg?v=1752237652"},{"product_id":"years-of-fighting-exile","title":"Years of Fighting Exile","description":"These powerful and original poems are the expression of a life which spans a childhood on the sugar estates of Guyana, a young manhood involved with such liberating spirits of the anti-colonial movement in the Guyanese arts as Martin Carter, Wilson Harris and Ivan Van Sertima, the painful decision to go into exile and years of disillusion in Britain. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet though some of these poems stare into the face of despair, the collection as a whole expresses a visionary faith in the regenerative power of love and the freedom of the poetic imagination. The collection brings together the radical anticolonial poems and an African Guyanese man's paens of praise to Indian womanhood of \u003ci\u003ePray for Rain\u003c\/i\u003e (1958); the poems of psychic disturbance of \u003ci\u003eSources of Agony\u003c\/i\u003e (1979) and many previously unpublished. The language of these poems is marked by a rich fertility of image and a bold heterogeneity of diction, a reflection of the diverse sources of experience from which they grow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Williams's journey from hope to disillusion parallels the experience of many other black people, old and young; but he retails that journey with sensitivity and maturity...\" \u003cbr\u003ePrabu Guptara, \u003ci\u003eBritish Book News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"'To Alice' and 'Ann Whittaker' deal with love, that most ordinary of miracles, in a way that makes it seem magical... They range from protest to bawdiness with room for celebration somewhere between.\" \u003cbr\u003eJeffrey Robinson, \u003ci\u003eKyk-over-Al\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMilton Williams\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Guyana. Part of a group of writers which included Martin Carter and Wilson Harris, he left Guyana in 1960, and lived in Newcastle for many years.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041088368,"sku":"9780948833014","price":6.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_1ac211c5-34a3-41c3-aa5b-aae49eba060d.jpeg?v=1752236768"},{"product_id":"sweetheart","title":"Sweetheart","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize 2012.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDulcinea Evers, a young Jamaican artist who has reinvented herself in the USA as the flamboyant Cinea Verse, has died in unclear circumstances. But who was Dulcinea? Her friend, Cheryl, who is carrying her ashes back to New York from her Jamaican funeral, has one story, but the narratives of the other people in Dulci’s life suggest that not even Cheryl’s version is the whole one. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the words of Dulci’s angry, disappointed father, her ineffectual mother, her middle-aged married lover and the angry wife who came after her with a machete, the art critic husband whom she used to get American residency, and Cheryl, the friend who has her own secrets, facets of Dulci begin to emerge: talented, reckless and, as we see when Aunt Mavis begins to speak, fundamentally alone. And it is Aunt Mavis, the solitary and reluctant seer, who understands the true challenge of Dulci’s gift.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn telling Dulci’s story through those who speak to her, Alecia McKenzie has skilfully organised a narrative that is both multi-layered in offering deepening cycles of understanding, and has the onward thrust of progressive revelation. There is space, too, for readers to come to their own conclusions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlecia McKenzie was born and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. Her short stories, \u003cem\u003eSatellite City\u003c\/em\u003e, won the Commonwealth Writers regional prize for the best first work in 1993.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book \/ Paperback","offer_id":1041088512,"sku":"9781845231774","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_24f60b3a-301b-4992-aade-77833cbeca58.jpeg?v=1752237354"}],"url":"https:\/\/inpressbooks.co.uk\/collections\/peepal-tree-press-1\/gitan-djeli.oembed","provider":"Inpress Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}